Consider the following puzzle, borrowed from Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast And Slow:
A bat and ball cost $1.10.
The bat costs one dollar more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?
The puzzle naturally evokes an intuitive answer: 10 cents (the correct answer is 5 cents). The puzzle is a very simple math puzzle that is easily solved using careful reasoning. But when we are intellectually lazy, we tend to follow our gut instincts or intuitions, even when the task is not the kind of task that should be handled in this way. Mathematical and logical exercises typically cannot be solved using our gut instinct.
Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky, however, have taken this insight one step further. They have argued that we do not reason rationally in everyday circumstances and regularly are subject to cognitive illusions, produced by heuristics, or rules of thumb, that we rely on when we reason fast. The mistake we make in these cases is to rely on intuition-based decision making processes rather than slow conscious and careful reasoning. Only the latter type of cognitive processing is reliable as a method for making decisions and predictions. Or so the argument goes.
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